Toilets In Motion — Submarine Toilets

Submarine Toilets

Just like surface ships,
the toilet on board a submarine
is referred to as its head
out of traditional maritime custom.
Compared to their surface cousins,
submarines have a much more difficult time dealing with
mundane operations including flushing the toilet.
During the last month of World War II, a German U-boat
was lost due to problems with its toilet.
The captain of the U-1206 wanted to use
the toilet, and did so without the assistance of one of
the on-board engineers qualified in the operation of
that particular toilet.
The resulting mishap threatened to poison the crew with
chlorine gas and forced the submarine to surface during
the daytime near the coast of Scotland.
It was quickly spotted by a British aircraft which
attacked the sub and damaged it badly enough that
it was unable to safely dive.
The captain scuttled the submarine, just 10 days into
the only real combat patrol for both the submarine
and its captain, and just over two weeks before
Hitler's suicide leading to
Germany's surrender 8 days later.

Cross-section diagrams of a German Type VIIc U-boat.

Nazi Germany and U-Boats

Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine (or Navy)
built and operated submarines.
The German term Unterseeboot
(or "Undersea boat"), commonly shortened to
U-Boot is used as a generic term for
any submarine.
The English version, U-Boat,
refers exclusively to German military submarines,
especially those of the First and Second World Wars.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 led to the
Treaty of Versailles and its restriction of the
size of the German surface fleet and outright
prohibition of German submarines.
Germany soon established a submarine design office
in the Netherlands, a torpedo research program in
Sweden, and concealed other submarine construction
under the cover of "research" or other ruses.

After Germany had been caught running these illegal submarine
projects, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935
attempted to regulate the size of the German
Kriegsmarine in relation to that of the
U.K.'s Royal Navy.
The German surface fleet was not to exceed 35% the tonnage
of the Royal Navy, while it would be allowed a submarine
tonnage equal to that of the entire British Commonwealth
of Nations.

Germany, of course, exceeded the limits all around,
and Adolf Hitler renounced the agreement on 28 April 1939,
just over 4 months before Germany started World War II in
Europe by invading Poland.
At that point Germany had 65 U-boats, and 21 of them
were at sea and ready for war when the war began on
1 September 1939.

The Type VII series of U-boat was the
most common during the war.
There were 10 Type VIIA subs built in 1936 and 1937,
then 24 Type VIIB subs built between 1936 and 1940,
each with an added 33 tonnes of fuel
(and another 2,500 nautical miles of range),
increased speed and manuverability,
and an upgrade from 11 to 14 torpedos.

The Type VIIC was the core of the
German submarine force.
568 Type VIIC U-boats were launched between 1940 and the
last one, the U-1308, launched in November 1944 and
commissioned 17 January 1945.

The U-1206

The U-1206 was built at the Schichau-Werke
yard in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland).
It was laid down on 12 June 1943,
launched on 30 December 1943,
and commissioned on 16 March 1944.

A few months later, the Germans began forcing Jewish prisoners
from Poland, France, Netherlands, Lithuania, Latvia, Germany,
and Hungary held at the nearby
concentration camp KL Stutthof
to work 12-hour shifts at Schichau-Werke.
They were allowed just a half litre of watery soup and
250 grams of bread during the day and another half-litre
of soup after work,
were not given adequate clothing in winter,
and died in large numbers due to workplace accidents,
epidemics, and beatings by the guards.

The U-1206 was commissioned under
Oberleutnant zur See Günther Fritze
and deployed in training exercises with the
8th U-boat Flotilla from March until June 1944,
when it was assigned to the 11th U-boat Flotilla
and
Kapitänleutnant
Karl-Adolf Schlitt
took command.

The German Kriegsmarine adapted a Dutch naval
innovation from the late 1930s,
the snuiver (or "sniffer").
This was a device that brought in air for the diesel engines
while the submarine itself was submerged.
The device was renamed a schnorkel and widely
installed on Nazi submarines during the last year of the war.
The U-1206 had one added when it was assigned to the
11th U-boat Flotilla.

By the time the snorkel was fitted and tested, it
was well into the spring of 1945 and the end of the
war was in sight.
The snorkel was of mixed benefits.
A sub running submerged on diesel power relying on the
snorkel was limited to a speed of six knots, in order
to avoid breaking the snorkel's air tube extended at
a right angle through the water.
The "feather" kicked up by the snorkel was visible
over a long distance.
Early radar systems could detect periscope tips,
and snorkels were at least as large a radar target.
UK radar systems of 1940 could detect a submarine
periscope from a half-mile away.

The worst thing for the crew was when a larger wave caused
the snorkel's automatic valves to slam shut.
The diesel engines would suddenly begin drawing air from
within the boat, causing a partial vacuum that sometimes
led to ruptured eardrums.

First Patrol of the U-1206

The U-1206 departed Kiel on 28 March 1945 on a two-day
training patrol in the North Sea.
It returned to port at Horten Naval Base on the 30th.

Second Patrol of the U-1206

The second training patrol was shorter, just one day.
It left Horten on 2 April 1945 and put in at
Kristiansand on the next day, the 3rd.

Third and Final Patrol of the U-1206

The U-1206 departed from Kristiansand on its first
active patrol on 6 April 1945.
It headed into the North Sea, between Britain and Scandinavia.

The Loss of the U-1206

Eight days into its only combat patrol on
14 April 1945,
the U-1206 was cruising at a depth of 200 feet off the
coast of Scotland.
The Type VIIc design had a test depth of 230 meters
(or 750 feet),
and an estimated crush depth of 250–295 meters
(or 820–968 feet).
They were just 8 nautical miles off the easternmost
tip of the coast of Scotland at Peterhead, in
Aberdeenshire.

Captain Schlitt decided that he needed to
use the toilet.
The U-1206 had a new toilet design, intended to support
operation at greater depth and thus exterior pressure.
But a new design is an unfamiliar one, and he called
for assistance.
The specialist who arrived was also unfamiliar with the
details of the new toilet design, as only some of the
engineering ratings had been fully trained in the
operation of the new toilet design.
He opened the wrong valve and salty seawater started pouring
into the submarine and flooding the battery compartment.

Basic chemistry time:

Water is H2O and salt is NaCl.
Dissolve salt in water and you get an solution
of Na+ and Cl– ions.
Pure H2O isn't conductive, but an
ionic solution certainly is.
And diesel-electric submarines carry battery banks
with enormous capacity.
They provide 560 kilowatts of power for propulsion
submerged.

H2O + Na+ + Cl– +
sub battery

→

H2O + NaOH + Cl2 + H2

Oh, my.
Water plus lye plus
chlorine gas plus
hydrogen gas.

Chlorine gas is a deadly poison,
and recall Germany's earlier misadventure with hydrogen
and the
LZ 129 Hindenburg
at U.S. Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Oh, the humanity.

Time to air out the boat, fast.

The submarine had to surface to clear the chlorine gas
out of the air.
Unfortunately, this was during the daytime and a British
coastal patrol aircraft happened to be flying nearby.
The U-1206 crew was managing to blow good air in and
poisonous and explosive gases out, but meanwhile they were
under fire from the British plane.
One man was killed during the aerial attack,
and the submarine was damaged to the point it couldn't
safely be submerged.

Kapitänleutnant Karl-Adolf Schlitt
ordered that the
code books
should be thrown overboard in the weighted bags brought
along for exactly that purpose,
the scuttling valves should be opened,
and the men should abandon ship.
Three men drowned in the heavy seas while abandoning ship.

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.